by R Weir
“What the fuck do you want?” he said.
“Came here to ask some questions,” I replied. “I’d buy you another beer, but I think you’ve had plenty. What about some food to provide a balanced diet?”
I don’t think he cared for my humor, as he took his hand and tried to push me off of the stool. It wasn’t much of a push and I barely moved at all.
“Leave me alone or I’ll punch your lights out.”
I looked him over and came to the conclusion he couldn’t punch out anything. He was around my height, but probably thirty pounds heavier, with most of it in his waist and hips. His arms and chest weren’t small, but didn’t look firm. If he hit the gym in the last year or so I’d be shocked. Even though in uniform, he had no gun or weapons that I could see. He was overmatched, but couldn’t admit it in his current state.
“Dennis, you couldn’t take me on a good day,” I said. “Why don’t you take me up on the offer of some free food? It might help you sober up some and we can have a gentlemanly conversation.”
He slid off his stool and took a long-armed sling at me. I had already moved and slipped the punch with little effort, pushing him in the back as he passed me. Straightening himself he tried again and I blocked it with my left arm and punched him once in the stomach with enough snap it knocked the wind out of him. As he gasped I could tell he was going to lose everything in his stomach. Asking for directions to the restroom, I led him quickly where he found an empty stall and threw up. Waiting patiently, I tossed him some wet towels to clean up. I walked back out while he freshened up and spoke to the bouncer making sure he was cool with what happened. After explaining and showing him ID, he was fine so long as there wouldn’t be any more trouble.
“I think all the starch in him just was flushed down the toilet,” I said.
He laughed and returned to his post while I took a seat at a table and ordered two Sprites, wings and mozzarella sticks from the Happy Hour menu. After about five minutes Dennis came out and sat across from me.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“In time. Food and some soda will help. It will be here shortly.”
The soda arrived and he took a long drink. I told the waitress to bring him another one to try and ease his stomach.
“Good punch,” he said.
“Thanks.” I could tell him I held back some and it could have been worse. But I didn’t care to rub it in. Life for him at this time was not all roses. That was obvious from my encounter with his wife.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Your wife told me.”
“Did she offer to bang your brains out as well?”
I shrugged. No need to flaunt it.
“And did you?”
“No. It wouldn’t have done her or me any good. Besides your kids were there and they don’t need to learn that about their mom.”
“Even though he is young, I think my son already knows. Anything in a uniform she’ll screw. That is how we met.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, no one to blame but myself.”
The food arrived and he dug in the wings as if he hadn’t eaten in two days. Of course his stomach was empty now, so no surprise.
“You said you have some questions for me. You are a private cop, that much I deduced from your ID. What did you want to talk about?”
“Aaron Bailey’s murder.”
He looked up from eating another wing, a bit of fear now showing in his eyes. He glanced around the room to make sure no one heard me. Over the music playing that was highly unlikely, since no one was sitting close to us.
“I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
“Why not?”
“It will get me fired. Or worse.”
“All I want to know is what you found when you arrived on the scene. You were the first to find him.”
“Yeah, sure, I was. I went out to do my rounds and found him. Horrible sight to see.”
“Did you know Aaron?”
“Somewhat. You know, said hi when he’d sign out at night. It was not like we were buddies.”
I grabbed a couple of the cheese sticks before all the food was gone. I waved down the waitress to bring us some more wings so I could try some, since the basket was empty.
“Did he sign out that night?”
“Gee, I don’t know if I should say anything.”
“Dennis, no one will know you talked with me. Look around and there is no one here even paying attention to us right now. Your wife mentioned you want to be a cop. This is your chance to help me figure out who killed him, just like a real detective would do.”
He grabbed some napkins to clean off the sauce from his face and hands. He was processing what to say, and I wondered if he knew more than he would tell me. All I could do was work him.
“No, he didn’t. I never saw him sign out.”
“So how could he have gotten outside without you knowing it?”
“Shit, that is easy. Anyone can sneak out if they want to. The procedure is to check out, but it’s not like we can enforce it. Most of the bigwigs never check in or out. They are too high and mighty to. Their security cards allow them to come and go as they please.”
“So did you know the security system was down?”
“Sure we did. That is why I was out walking. Normally we don’t go out too often to walk the grounds because we can see almost everything from the cameras. That night the ones for the parking garage and area around it were down. So I had to do a walk through every hour or so.”
“Was only the parking garage security down?”
“Yes. The rest of them were working fine, covering the front area and visitor parking.”
“Did that happen often?”
“Not that I recall. I mean it is technology, so it does fail occasionally. But I don’t remember the last time it didn’t all work.”
“Did anyone tell you why it wasn’t working?”
“No, they don’t tell me shit. I’m just a lowly night-shift security guard. You’d think I could get the hell off of graveyard, but so far they tell me there are no positions available. At least I get some shift differential for working those god-awful hours.”
The other basket of wings arrived, and this time I got my hands on a couple before he could devour them. I went over all I had learned and wished there had been more. I continued to press to see what else he might spill.
“So when you found him, he was already dead?”
“Yes. There was a lot of blood, but I checked for a pulse and didn’t find one. The investigators weren’t thrilled I’d done that, but I had to be sure. If there was any way I could help him, I wanted to try.”
“You saw no one else there at the scene?”
“Nothing. He was all alone, sitting there against the car door. I called it in to the security desk and waited for the police to arrive. They asked me a lot of questions and even checked my gun to see if it had been fired. It was a long night.”
“When it was all over, your bosses told you to keep quiet about it?”
“Not to the cops. They said to tell the truth. But to anyone else I was to remain quiet. You aren’t going to rat me out, are you? I really need this job.”
“No, I will remain silent.”
“Good. I mean, I really feel sorry for Aaron and all. I do hope they figure who killed him. But I have to look out for me and my family.”
I should have pointed out to him there probably wasn’t much of a family to save, but like with everything else for this group, it probably would do no good.
Chapter 16
The other friend I was going to talk with still worked at WANN Systems. Mandy had provided the name, Shaw Bentley, and I contacted him. We would meet at his apartment complex down in Lone Tree after he got home from work at around 8 p.m. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, I knocked on his door. Once inside, after showing ID, he offered me a drink as I sat in a chair at his kitchen table.<
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“Bottled water, if you have any,” I said.
He pulled out a fresh bottle from the fridge and sat down. He was probably close to my age, but shorter and heavier. He was dressed in beige Dockers and a blue polo. His dark hair was short and thinning, with a slight curl. He had poured himself a shot of whiskey, which he slammed back and then poured a second shot, which he carried to the table.
“You said you are investigating Aaron’s shooting,” he said.
“Yes, I’ve been hired to look into it.”
“The police say it was random. A robbery.”
“I’ve not come to that conclusion. I believe there was more to it.”
He looked a little nervous. Maybe why he needed the shot and one in reserve.
“Aaron was a good guy. We’d often have lunch together and talk about tech stuff.”
“You still work at WANN?”
“Yes.”
“What do you do there?”
“I work within the marketing group. Graphic design, logos, press releases; those type of things. We are the face of the company. What the general public sees first.”
“Image is everything.”
“Certainly in the corporate world it can be. The difference between success and failure.”
“I understand they are quite demanding of their employees.”
“Yes, they are. I’m lucky I’m home in time to meet you. Unless you have a severed limb you need to be at work. A typical day is 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. They give us notebooks, so then after getting home you are expected to VPN in and work some more.”
“Hard on your private life.”
“Why I’m living in an apartment. My wife and I split up because I worked too much.”
“How is the pay?”
“If you worked forty hours a week, it’s not bad. But when you work sixty-plus, then not so much. But it pays the bills and I don’t have to eat mac and cheese each night.”
“No overtime?”
“I’m on salary, so there is no such thing. But even hourly employees are told to only enter in forty and no more, even when working more.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Who is going to complain? You’d get fired or worse!”
“And what would be worse?”
“A visit from one of the security people. A gentle nudge to follow the unwritten rules. Veiled threats of a cut in pay, a transfer to a less desirable position or losing your job.”
“Why not get another job?”
“I have quite a few years there I’d hate to throw away. Plus, it’s hard to find something when you work nearly non-stop. And you have to be careful. If they find out you are looking, they’ve been known to fire people without severance and not pay any of your leftover vacation or sick time.”
“What about Aaron? Did he mention anything to you about finding bugs in your software?”
Shaw grabbed the second shot and downed it quickly, his hand shaking some.
“Since we mostly talked at work, he couldn’t say much. And our work phones are monitored, along with email and instant messaging. But we did have dinner out a couple weeks before his death and he asked me if I knew about any type of snooping or data gathering we were doing with our equipment.”
“You mean internally?”
“No, he was talking about the stuff we sell to clients. Was it gathering information, tracking all the traffic on their networks.”
“Was it?”
“I told him no.”
“Was it the truth?”
His eyes looked down at the shot glass. He got up and poured another one. Even with his extra weight, this would soon begin to impair him.
“Maybe you should slow down some on the whiskey?” I said.
“Sorry. I’m nervous. Why I wanted to meet you here. And told you to make sure you weren’t followed.”
“I wasn’t. You are safe. So when you are ready, you can continue. No pressure.”
He looked at the glass, but didn’t drink. He was trying to steady himself. Often I found the harder you tried to relax, the worse it got. I sat, waiting him out.
“There were rumors. Nothing I can prove or say for certain. But yes, I’d heard about possible information gathering they were using.”
“What types of information can they obtain, if it were true?”
“Everything. I’m sure you’ve been on the Internet. We put it all out there for everyone to see and hear. We buy everything using our credit cards, whether on the Internet or in a store using a credit card machine, which transmits back to servers. How often have you had to change your credit card out after a fraudulent purchase was made?”
He was right. My credit card had been replaced a couple of times because of fraud. I wasn’t on the hook for the charges, but someone had to eat the cost. I doubted the culprits got caught in most cases.
“So aren’t the transactions protected somehow? Encrypted?”
“Sure. But nothing is hundred percent fool-proof safe. Encryption can be bypassed. Most basic 128-bit keys can easily be broken these days.”
“You sound like you have a coding background?”
“I do. I coded before going into marketing. My skills aren’t what they once were, since I don’t keep up. But I understand it.”
“So if Aaron did stumble onto something, is it possible he was killed because of it?”
“It is not out of the realm of possibilities.”
“Are you aware of any links WANN has to some Russian mobsters?”
Shaw this time did drink down the third shot. Much more of this, and his head would be hitting the table top from passing out.
“The last couple of days, there were some large men making the rounds at the office. I heard one of them talk and he sounded Russian.”
I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture.
“Yeah, that was him.”
“And you hadn’t seen them around until recently?”
“Only the last few days. So they are criminals?”
“I haven’t completely confirmed it yet, but it looks like it. They came and visited me, wanting to know why I was snooping around Aaron’s murder.”
I left out the part about them planning to beat the information out of me. I figured Shaw didn’t need any more to worry about.
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing more than I’m a PI working a case.”
“And they left you alone?”
“A Denver cop friend of mine intervened, so I didn’t have to answer their questions.”
“Am I safe?”
“They won’t know I’ve come to visit you. There is no reason to think they’d hurt you.”
I’m not sure he felt reassured by my words, or that what I said was true. I wasn’t even certain. If they knew of his friendship to Aaron, they might come a-calling.
“Do you have any vacation or sick time coming?” I asked.
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
I smiled and made the suggestion that he leave town for a while. Maybe Mitch and him could split the cost!
Chapter 17
At the rate people were leaving town in fear, thanks to me, I would have the city to myself before too long. Well, at least the streets would be free of traffic. Though it would take a lot more people leaving before helping with congestion that I sat stuck in trying to get to the FBI office in north Denver.
I had called Agent Dezmond Price the next day and arranged an appointment with him. He sounded a little put off on the phone when I called, but listened more closely when I mentioned the last name Platov. Once I arrived, I locked my gun away in my Mustang, chancing I could go unarmed on the walk through security. Once inside after a thorough check of my body, and showing ID and signing in, I was told where to go. The Denver FBI office was a big step up from Des Moines. Apparently their budget was higher, with a nicer glass and chrome building, and better furnishings. Up the elevator to the fourth floor I found Price’s office. His door was open and I walked in.
He wasn’t there so I took a seat and waited. His desktop was covered with computer monitor, keyboard and mouse, files, his name plate, and a picture of his wife and kids. I resisted the urge to snoop through his files. On the wall were diplomas and honors for working at the FBI, showing fifteen years of dedicated service. I heard footsteps and he walked in, dressed as all Feds, in black jacket, slacks and tie, with white shirt and shoulder holster and gun, underneath. I stood to shake his hand, but he passed by me without an effort to oblige. He was tall like an average college point guard, and appeared in good shape. His skin matched his black hair, which was cut short and combed so no hair was out of place. When he sat down he put on some reading glasses after grabbing a file on his desk. He was silent while he read over a few pages in the manila folder. Once done he set it down, leaned back in his chair and looked straight at me.
“Interesting reading about you,” he said. “Seems you got yourself into a pickle last year in Des Moines.”
“Into and back out of, I’m assuming it says.”
“Sounds like by the skin of your teeth. Lucky to be alive.”
“Luck and skill sometimes are closely aligned.”
“Seems like a reckless attitude to have.”
“Sometimes you need to take chances to succeed. I’m sure Wilson told you what was accomplished by my recklessness.”
“Much about you I’ve read in the file. What he told me is you punched him in the stomach.”
“It was a love tap, to get his attention.”
“Tap me and I’ll lock you up.”
“Fair enough. Can we get past the foreplay and get down to business. You’ve titillated me enough.”
“Said you were a smart mouth too. That won’t fly with me either.”
I sighed, growing tired of the back and forth.
“So do I walk away now, or do we find a common ground and work together.”
He leaned forward in his chair, standing to walk over to his small fridge. He pulled out two bottles of OJ and tossed one to me. He twisted off the top and took a drink, sitting on the edge of his desk.